A few years ago I co-created a digital archive. The Victorian Jewish Writers Project began as a scholarly problem: nineteenth-century Jewish writers in Britain had been systematically excluded from the literary canon, their work scattered across out-of-print volumes, digitized newspaper runs, and institutional collections that had no particular reason to surface them together. The project was an attempt to do something about that, to gather, describe, and make discoverable a body of writing that existing finding tools were not built to find.
Building the VJWP was a crash course in library infrastructure, and it raised a question I keep coming back to in my own line of work and one I see digital humanities scholars grappling with constantly: who actually keeps the archive, and what does “keeping” require?
The Canon as a discovery problem
Literary canons get discussed in scholarship mostly in terms of taste, power, and critical judgment, and those conversations are important. But there’s a systems dimension that gets less attention. A writer disappears from literary history not only because critics stopped writing about them, but because the infrastructure of literary culture stopped indexing them. Their books go out of print. Their names don’t appear in the reference works that later scholars use to build reading lists. The bibliographic record gets thin, and once it gets thin enough, they become genuinely hard to find even if you’re looking.
This is a metadata problem as much as it is a cultural one. The Victorian Jewish writers I work with weren’t hidden exactly; their work was published, reviewed, and read in their own time. What happened was that the systems that organize literary knowledge, the indexes, the anthologies, the library catalogs, the reference databases, were built by people with particular assumptions about what mattered, and those assumptions had consequences that compounded over decades.
Recovery work, the scholarly project of bringing marginalized writers back into critical view, is in part a project of rebuilding metadata. You’re not just arguing that a writer deserves attention. You’re creating the bibliographic infrastructure that makes attention possible.
Building the thing
The Victorian Jewish Writers Project involved the kinds of decisions that feel literary and curatorial on the surface but turn out to be deeply technical underneath. How do you handle a writer who published under multiple names, or whose name was anglicized differently in different sources? How do you represent a text that exists in a serialized newspaper version and a later collected edition that differs substantially from it? How do you describe work that sits at the intersection of multiple traditions, British, Jewish, immigrant, women’s writing, without flattening it into a single category that loses something important?
These are cataloging questions. They’re the same questions that library metadata professionals deal with in any complex collection, just with a particular set of historical and cultural stakes attached. The choices you make about how to describe something determine whether it’s findable, and by whom, and in what context.
On the technical side, building a usable public-facing archive means making decisions about platforms, schemas, and long-term sustainability that most literary scholars are not trained to think about. A project that lives on a faculty member’s departmental web hosting has a lifespan tied to that person’s institutional affiliation. A project built on a well-intentioned but unsupported custom CMS can become inaccessible within a decade as dependencies go unmaintained. The scholarly work and the infrastructure work have to be thought about together, or the archive doesn’t last.
Cultural heritage as an infrastructure problem
Institutions that do this work seriously, libraries, archives, digital humanities centers, understand that cultural heritage projects are fundamentally infrastructure projects. The content matters, obviously. But what makes it durable and discoverable is the layer underneath: the metadata schema, the persistent identifiers, the hosting environment, the commitment to maintenance over time.
This is why the library systems side of my work and the scholarly side feel continuous to me rather than separate. When I’m debugging why a discovery layer isn’t surfacing a particular collection, or writing a Python script to normalize inconsistent metadata exports, or thinking about how IIIF can make digitized manuscript images interoperable across institutions, I’m doing a version of the same thing I was doing with the Victorian Jewish Writers Project: trying to make something findable that would otherwise get lost.
The writers I work on were neglected in part because the systems of literary culture weren’t built to hold them. Building better systems, more thoughtful metadata, more robust infrastructure, more sustainable platforms, is one of the ways you push back against that. It’s not the only way, and it doesn’t substitute for the critical and historical work of reading and interpreting. But without it, the recovery is fragile. You’ve argued for the writer’s importance, but you haven’t made them findable. And findability, as any librarian will tell you, is most of the battle.
What gets kept
Every archive involves choices about what gets kept and what doesn’t, and those choices are never purely neutral. They reflect the priorities, resources, and blind spots of the people and institutions doing the keeping. The VJWP is a small intervention in a large pattern, an attempt to make one corner of literary history more navigable than it was.
But the question it raises, who keeps the archive, and what systems do they use, and who do those systems serve, is one that applies well beyond Victorian literature. It applies to every collection that gets built, every catalog that gets maintained, every discovery layer that decides what to surface and what to bury on page twelve of the results. The infrastructure of cultural memory is not neutral, and the people who build and maintain it are making consequential choices whether or not they frame them that way.